Philippe Le Guay's long feature debut, Les Deux Fragonard, benefited from significant enough means to provide a good recreation of the eighteenth century setting, during the reign of Louis XV. With his co-writer Jérôme Tonnerre, Le Guay was freely inspired by the life of Jean-Honoré Fragonard, endowing him with a cousin who turns out to be also an artist but in a very different field. The first one (Joachim de Almeida) is a fashion painter and womanizer, which leads him to a life of pleasure, while Cyprien (Robin Renucci) is an anatomist attracted to death and fascinated by the mechanics of the human body, which he likes to dissect using stolen corpses.
Add to this a beautiful washerwoman, Marianne (Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu), who has become a model for Jean-Honoré Fragonard and a sombre aristocrat (Sami Frey) whose main interest is to put her under the scalpel of the Cyprien Fragonard, and you have all the ingredients of a gothic tale tinged with poetry and black humour.
One of the major assets of the movie is the gorgeous score by Jorge Arriagada. The composer managed to exploit the richness of the contrasts between two worlds of light and shadow, of springy jubilation and existential torment, delivering a wide variety of entrancing themes. Arriagada would resume his collaboration with Le Guay for three other movies, notably The Women on the 6th Floor and Bicycling with Molière.
Les Deux Fragonard was not very successful back in 1989. Philippe Le Guay had made a film a little ahead of its time, showing the fascination of the crowd for traveling exhibitions of flayed human bodies, preserved thanks to recent advances in science. Perceptions have changed and there is a good chance that this original movie can be better understood and appreciated today.
